Epidemic saga: Imagine we knew how the pandemic began

By David Wallace-Wells

NEW YORK: For those eager to move on from the Covid-19 pandemic, the latest chatter about the coronavirus’s origin may feel like a distraction: In the space of about a month, there was a leak from the Department of Energy about a “low confidence” assessment of a lab origin, followed quickly by warring scientific research and commentary about what it means that raccoon-dog DNA was found alongside SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan’s Huanan wet market in January of 2020, followed by another leak from the Covid House subcommittee documenting early, behind-the-scenes discussions by top scientists expressing perhaps more openness to a laboratory origin than they felt comfortable endorsing in public.

To some, it all sounds like noise. “Whether Covid came accidentally from a lab in Wuhan or a seafood market is almost beside the point,” Edward Luce wrote in The Financial Times last month, echoing arguments that have been circulating since 2021 that we don’t need to resolve the origin of Covid-19 to take action against it or prevent future pandemics. In a March Guardian editorial that similarly treated the matter of origin as an arcane sideshow, the paper emphasised expanding disease surveillance, protecting natural habitats, reforming factory farming and ramping up lab safety — and concluded that all “this, rather than the blame game, is what politicians should prioritise.”

This has always struck me as an exceedingly strange perspective. Perhaps it is a truism to say that the events that brought about the deaths of perhaps 20 million people around the world and the jagged disruption of many billions of other lives are of enormous consequence and that dismissing the matter of its cause as simply a “blame game” is a form of not just historical but moral incuriosity.

But the origin debate isn’t only consequential because it might someday be definitively resolved. It is consequential as long as it remains unresolved, as well. That’s because our collective uncertainty about the origin of the pandemic has itself shaped the way we’ve come to think about what we’ve all just lived through, the way we responded in the first place and the way the pandemic has played out, often weaponised, in geopolitics.

In many ways, you can tally the impact of the coronavirus without having to know whether it jumped to humans from animals naturally or in a laboratory setting. But the experience and memory of the pandemic is not recorded only in statistics. Three years since its start we are still more likely to see the pandemic in partisan rather than world-historical terms. And the grandly tragic story of the pandemic takes on a profoundly different shape and colour depending on the nature of its first act.

How so? In a world where a natural origin was confirmed beyond all doubt, we might look back and narrate the pandemic as one particular kind of story: a morality tale showcasing the incomplete triumph of modern civilisation and the enduring threats from nature, and highlighting the way that, whatever we might have told ourselves in 2019 or 2009 about the fortress of the wealthy world, pandemic disease remained a humbling civilisation-scale challenge no nation had very good answers for.

That may well be the likeliest resolution. But in a world where a lab-leak origin had been confirmed instead, we would probably find ourselves telling a very different set of stories — primarily about humanity’s Icarian hubris, or perhaps about scientists’ Faustian indifference to the downside risks of new research, or the way in which very human impulses to cover up mistakes and wrongdoing might have compounded those mistakes to disastrous global effect. The lesson would not be that disease remains ineradicably with us or that public health struggles, for all its wisdom and power, to truly contain the spread of a highly transmissible disease. It would have been, “We brought this on ourselves.” Or perhaps, if we were feeling xenophobic rather than humbly human, “They brought this on us,” as some did at the very beginning of the pandemic. If a lab origin had been confirmed, we might never have drifted from that timeline.

Particulars aside, the pandemic would probably have joined nuclear weapons as a conventional illustration of the dark side of human knowledge, perhaps even surpassed them — 20 million dead is nothing to trifle with, after all, though it remains less than the overall death toll of World War II or even the Great Leap Forward. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Robert Oppenheimer is said to have remarked, citing the Bhagavad Gita while watching the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, which killed no one. The story is probably apocryphal; witnesses remember him saying only, “It worked.” But what epigraph would we turn to in making sense of a laboratory accident?

Sure knowledge of the pandemic’s experimental origin might’ve been a horror to contemplate, given that a lab leak would mean both that the responsibility for all those deaths was human and that it was most likely the result of a tragic mistake. And yet the horror would also offer a silver lining: If human action was responsible for this pandemic, then in theory, human action could prevent the next one as well.

But in a world where neither narrative has been confirmed, and where pandemic origins are governed by an epistemological fog, I worry we have begun to collate the two stories in a somewhat paradoxical and self-defeating way. According to recent polling by The Economist and YouGov, two-thirds of Americans now believe that the pandemic began in a lab, up from just over half in 2021 (and including 53 percent of Democrats). And yet the matters of lab safety and even pandemic responsibility appear somehow less front-and-centre within the public and political discourse than do questions of mask mandates and school closings, which the country has long since left behind. It is as though we’ve decided both that the pandemic was “man-made” and that its emergence was a kind of inevitability we can’t do much about.

It may well be natural that in living through disaster, we focus first on triage and response. But as we piece together a working history of the past few years, you might hope we’d grow more focused on nailing the story down.

We’d lived through SARS and MERS and still carried some faint cultural memory of 1918 (less so 1957 and 1968). But it is hard to hear the phrases “lab leak” and “gain of function” and not think “superbug.” And it is hard to think “superbug” and not panic. Pandemics are long and hard, and offer ultimately ample opportunities for recrimination. But ambiguity contributes, as well, even when the known facts raise only a sliver of doubt.